


Disentangling

by IceCycle



Category: Valdemar Series - Mercedes Lackey
Genre: Angst, Chronic Illness, Consent Issues, Emotions, Gen, Healers, Healing, Healing-Adept, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Magic, Mental Health Issues, MindHealing, One Shot, Past Rape/Non-con, Physical Disability, Psychological Trauma, Self-Destruction, Self-Worth Issues, Tayledras, Therapy, Will to Survive
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-04
Updated: 2019-01-04
Packaged: 2019-10-03 11:18:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17283056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IceCycle/pseuds/IceCycle
Summary: Moondance k'Treva is a skilled Healing-Adept.  He spends most of his time healing the lands with which his clan has been charged.  But his skills are also needed for his own people, and those nearby.  Sometimes, our life experiences don't let us develop the self-respect we need to conduct our own affairs.  We can't change what has already happened, but sometimes it's possible to change how it impact us so that we might be able to reshape the time ahead.An exploration of magic without a plot.  Commentary welcome.





	Disentangling

"How old were you?" Moondance had been working with Lisara for over a year now, but interrupted a few times now when she would disappear for up to months at a time. They sat now on a mat on the floor of the temple in one of the villages near the Vale, where he attended each first quarter of the moon as part of his outreach work. He knew there was a lot to her story, much more than he would ever know, never mind be able to ease. He thought this might be one of the important events, though, that might help him to understand why she was having such a hard time taking care of herself. Not that self-neglect was so uncommon a problem.

"16." She was looking at her hands now. "I..." She faltered. "I've never told anyone this before." She seemed to be composing her thoughts.

Moondance had heard that phrase many times before. Even now, he had a mixed reaction when he heard them. When he first started his training, he was awed by the trust those words implied, despite feeling humbled and often impotent to receive the confidence in a way that could heal. Now, he was just as much wearied by the burden of the confidence as by the decades worth of damage that these deliberately suppressed experiences typically had been allowed to do, unchecked by another human's common sensibilities. _This is here, that is there._ He frequently reminded himself of this distinction when his work threatened to pull at his own emotions.

"I — wasn't where I was supposed to be. I was never home if I could avoid it, because my aunt — well, she preferred drink." She was still looking at her hands, speaking haltingly in a monotone. The events seemed to be eluding her, hard to grasp long enough to put together in a sequence. He actually did not expect to hear the story when he had posed his question regarding an abuse she had referenced vaguely. He actually had just asked her age to triage its general impact on her. But this seemed to be a story she had been waiting to tell, and he was willing to hear it. "I went to the seedy part of town, where I knew I could get something good — but not hazia, not back then — to take my mind off what I'd rather forget."

The hazia root had consumed this woman's life for well over a decade after the lighter drugs, such as the one she likely sought at 16, had failed to numb her senses to her comfort. It had left a wraith of a woman once its oblivion had cleared. The healer in the village where she now lived had done all he could for her, so her case had been escalated to Moondance. Moondance was able to repair much of the damage from the addictive root, but he was unable to restore all of what the hazia had carved from her body. He needed to see her regularly to slow its relentless diseases. Still, despite the oblivion the root granted temporarily, at a steep price from her body, the hazia had not obliterated the path carved in her mind that had led her to desire the drug in the first place.

"I took a taste, and I wanted _more._ So I went with him." She paused again, brow furrowing for a split second, showing her regret, shame, and pain.

Moondance put his hands out between them, palms up in silent invitation, hoping not to interrupt the flow of what was already clearly a difficult story to tell. She would recognize the gesture from their previous work together as an offer to accompany and to assist, as he had before.

She glanced up at him with a grimace, as if in warning. "You do not want to see this."

"If it is fit for you to have experienced, then it is fit for me to see, Lisara. I want to understand, and to help if I am able." _You do not need to protect me, even though I am young, a little more than half your age._ That part he left unspoken. His palms remained out between them. In another few breaths, she lifted her hands to lay on his.

Moondance took a grounding breath. _This is here, that is there_ , he repeated to himself, as a reminder of the boundary _between_ as he accepted her hands and opened a mindlink through which he could do his work.

He was impressed. The images that had formed her storyline thus far were disjointed, as images of trauma usually were. But she had been able to hold them close enough together that they still made sense. The next image was further away, though, dark with the shrouds of shame, pain, anger, and humiliation, all wrapped tightly around it. _:This is my hand. May I?:_ Moondance had already established that he would help when he offered a mindlink, unless she had specified otherwise, but still preferred to be explicit about it.

Lisara shrugged dubiously, _I don't know why you would want to_ , being the unspoken thought that came with it, and nodded.

Moondance picked up the rope of _pain_ that wove — knotted, really — through this storyline. He started disentangling it so it could not trap her spirit as much. The press of her emotions against his shields was even a little stronger than he had felt from her at other times. _That is there, this is here_ , he reminded himself once again. He was no MindHealer, but problems of the mind interfered with his work with the rest of the body frequently enough that going into his clients' minds was commonplace. Some MindHealing was in the training of any Healing-Adept for this reason. Also, _I've never told anyone this before_ came up often enough that it wasn't practical to get them to a MindHealer first. Still disentangling and softening the hold of _pain_ in this memory, he prompted aloud, gently, "You went with him."

Her mind still struggled to bring the next image forward. Her own mind had been shielding her from its full impact for three decades. It was a protective mechanism, and for good reason. The protective part of her mind clung to the shrouds wrapped around the memory and tethered it in place, in internal conflict with her will, which now tugged it forward. 

_:Let me see. Let me help you.:_ That time he spoke into her mind. With that encouragement, her protector loosened its grip and her will prevailed. "Go on," he prompted aloud. Unless it pertained exclusively to what was going on in the mindlink, he preferred to keep his clients talking aloud. It seemed to keep them more grounded, and seemed to help them with their processing.

"He brought me to a building on the edge of town, far from where people go. But there were several other men upstairs." Even mostly unwrapped, the scene started and stopped, then jumped in time, with all the stigmata of a traumatic memory. "I was raped. Repeatedly. By four or five, maybe six of them." The images were playing out in brief stints. Physical pain here was mixed with her emotional pain, shame, anger, and fear. 

Moondance had seen many such scenes in his work, but it it never ceased to chill him to the bone. _That was then, this is_ now, he told himself, not that time perspective helped much _._ With each inhalation, Moondance peeled the pain away from her and took it into himself, where he felt it as an ill-formed discomfort separated from its context. His healing gift transmuted some of it into restless energy. With each exhale, he pushed much of that restless energy into the ground, where the fungi in the soil would turn it back to growing energy before some filtered back to the leylines. The remainder he returned to her, where the energy would have lost its sharpness and specificity over the course of the journey. Moondance was a conduit here, not a heat sink absorbing all the negative energy.

From the flashes, he couldn't tell exactly how many had held her down, stripped her, watched from the circle, or raped her. She probably didn't know, herself. It wasn't clear how long it had gone on, or even in what sequence it all had happened. He had enough magical dexterity that, while continuing to neutralize much of the pain, he also picked up the tangled ropes of _fear_ that were whipping at his shields. _That is there, this is here._ He knew this, but the reminder helped to protect him. This was not _his_ fear, for all that he was taking it into himself, feeling it, running it through his healing gift, and disposing much of it into the ground before returning the rest to Lisara. They wouldn't be able to move on until much of the raw emotion tied to this memory had been tamed.

"What happened next?" Moondance asked, when he felt he had done enough. Lisara was still caught up in the memory enough that she was staring wide-eyed at a space through the ground in front of her. Moondance still spoke aloud, encouraging her to stay present.

"I broke away." A small but rising wave of hope, courage, and self-efficacy, even a dash of pride. Moondance tried to support that wave, breathing into it like a bellows amplifies a fire. "I ran through the building, pushing through the doors that didn't have locks, then jumped out the front window and kept running, before they could do anything else to me. I managed to grab just my shirt, nothing else." Her images became a little more distinct, but still in a jumbled order.

Moondance smiled softly in pride. This was the part her that shook off the hazia root eventually, despite most people wasting away entirely on it. Those who go to the hazia have lost all hope, all will to live. But somehow, her will rose again and carried her back home, at least a little.

"I got — home. My aunt didn't even know I'd been out. She — passed out by the fire, which was down to the coals."

The mention of her aunt was accompanied by a very tangled lump of emotions, of sorrow, anger, regret, despair, disgust, and much more than he could identify at a glance, but that was not something they were going to tackle today. She should consult with an actual MindHealer about that.

The images faded away. Moondance dropped the threads of _pain_ and _fear_ that he had been softening and reducing. But then her state changed again and thoughts started swirling, with more overtones of _guilt_ than he'd seen before. He _could_ pull on those thoughts to find out what they were about, but he much preferred—

"Lisara, what then?" He had been invited into her mind and had permission to meddle, but would not _grab_ unless it were critical and he had no viable alternatives.

"I told you, I've never told anyone about this before. No one. But I should have." She lifted her eyes to him again. "Those men — another of their conquests, several months later — they killed her." She was becoming tense as a bowstring, pulled equally by guilt and by fear.

_That is there, this is here_ , the mantra to repeat when emotion begins to rise. Moondance shook his head sorrowfully.

"If only I'd had the courage to turn them in, she wouldn't have died. I knew they had it in them, when they attacked me. That's why I had to get away." She stopped there, fire burning in her eyes.

Moondance continued to gaze at her, waiting, but she was waiting, too. She still did not take her hands from his. "And why didn't you?" he asked, already knowing most of the answer, but wanting her to walk through her own reasoning.

"I was afraid they would kill me." The tight fear spread over in her mind, tinged with shame and guilt. "I was scared for my life."

If his purpose were only diagnostic, Moondance wouldn't need a mindtouch to feel the press of all of that, just a look at her face. He needed the link for his work, though. He began soothing the fear again and started to soften the shame. The guilt he hoped to take care of another way.

"If I'd just gone to the constable, they couldn't have killed her." Her gaze was sharp, daring him to disagree with her self-blame.

"But you know why you didn't."

Lisara remained silent, making it plain she would not help him here.

Moondance reluctantly filled in the gap. "In the land where you were living, they don't train, never mind employ, those with mind gifts. There is no Heraldic Circle or Council of Elders to bring the truth to bear with a truth spell. You know as well as I do that accounts of rape too often are dismissed, when the magistrate doesn't want to believe." He breathed compassion through the link, with the hope that she would take it as self-compassion. "You know there is every chance that they would have walked free, only to come back to hurt or kill you." Another breath of compassion. He worked on the fear a little more, but didn't want to dismantle too much of it, since this sort of fear promoted self-preservation.

The guilt was still there in her swirling thoughts, though backed with less certainty. 

"You knew at the time, even if you didn't think about it in as many words, that bringing up a complaint with your constable would have been done at great personal risk to your safety. With little chance that you could have saved her. You could _both_ have been dead." Moondance checked himself, since he had said a great many words and Lisara hadn't responded. But she was listening, and he still wasn't done.

"You were also a child. You were more vulnerable and less able to organize the resources that might keep you safe and get your story heard."

Lisara's thoughts began to calm and settle. She still hadn't formulated a response.

"You _cannot_ take responsibility for that young woman's death." Moondance raised his eyebrows for emphasis, fully intending to pin her with his gaze. Then, softer. "It's not your fault." Lisara closed her eyes at that, with a twinge in her mind akin to rubbing a sore muscle. "And it's time to let go of your sense of guilt so you can start to forgive yourself." _So that maybe you can live the life that you have left, rather than seeking oblivion or penance from your existence._ He left that unsaid for now, as well. Instead, he paused for space, to let her think. He felt his own tears in his eyes, reflecting how long this survivor's guilt had festered in her mind, unchecked even by a friend's sympathy, tainting the inside of her mind with this self-destructive desire to atone for something that did not belong in her column on the book of moral accounts. How might her life have been different if this shame had not re-drafted her adolescent identity? Might she have left alone the hazia root? Not that her upbringing had given her much of a chance in the first place.

To her credit, she hadn't contradicted him. Her brow was creased. Her thoughts were turning over, considering his words and whether she could accept them. Her mind would need to continue this dance later on its own to reach a conclusion.

"And what they did to you? You didn't deserve that. Any of it. Not for anything that you did before what happened, and not for anything you did or didn't do later on. Not even for looking for forgetfulness, or for being in the wrong part of town. Nothing you did was asking for it. They were wrong. They were wrong to commit that violence against you." He paused again. Her eyes gazed back at his. "And I'm so sorry that happened to you."

Her eyes filled but did not spill over, either. He could feel through the mindlink that she was still considering what he said, not dismissing it.

"I'm struck by the strength of character you showed by escaping before they could hurt you more. Not everyone would be able to do that. It was luck that you made for yourself in a terrible situation." Moondance had finally run out of things he wanted to say today, unless Lisara had more. He did send some of his acceptance and caring through the mindlink. He hoped that working through this with her might make it just a little bit easier for her to take care of herself, and to trust that he's not about to turn on her. He always appreciated when she came back following one of her disappearances. Helping people to build self-respect, self-efficacy, and trust in the world was hard. Often it was beyond Moondance's best efforts. This was not something you could build _for_ people, and getting past years to decades of self-disrespect positioned on a foundation of disrespected, neglectful, or abusive upbringing was sometimes an insurmountable task. The best he could do was set new expectations, demonstrate new ways to relate, promote self-affirming new experiences, occasionally change some thought patterns, and soften the impact of previous experiences.

"Thank you," she said finally. "I appreciate your words and your support." She did take her hands back to her lap at that point, and the mindlink ended.

Moondance smiled. "My pleasure. Do think on what I have said, and what you have said. I will ask the village healer to check on you in a week's time. Of course, I will need to see you again when I return next moon." He helped her up, handed her cane to her, and showed her to the door.

"Thank you for seeing me again," she said, also with a smile.

Moondance closed the door behind her. He wrote some notes for himself in his log and added her name with follow-up items to a list he would pass to the village healer. Before this discussion, he had renewed the energy redirects he had placed to keep her lungs and her liver from consuming themselves, both late effects of hazia-root addiction. He had also treated her hyper-sensitive pain channels, something that would never normalize after so much time dulled by hazia. The village healer would be more than capable of making sure those all stuck in a week. He would also ask him to check that her general emotional stability had not deteriorated as a side effect of opening this memory, which Moondance would describe to him in general terms as traumatic.

Moondance had a couple more clients on his list for the day, who undoubtedly have been waiting outside the temple while he was running late with Lisara. But first he stretched, leaned his head against the wall, let fall a few of the tears he'd held in his eyes earlier, reflected on the worse injustice outside his Vale, and then thought of Starwind. He would gratefully accept his beloved's comfort when he returned late this evening, like he always would on these outreach days. Of course the stories he heard and the pain he felt from others affected him, though he had mastered the psychological and magical skills in his training so that pain not his own would not break him. Moondance did know what it was like to feel responsible for another's death, and to desire death, himself. _But, unlike her, I actually did kill him, and nearly succeeded in killing myself._ _And could not be doing the work I do now without those events_ , as Starwind had reminded him many times. Moondance set those thoughts aside, as well. _No, definitely not the time to think about that, either._ He looked out the window of the temple at the trees, let his magic sink through his feet into the underground network of energy until he found and then touched the trunk of the tree he was looking at. A simple exercise, but one that renewed his contact with his surroundings and helped to clear his head without exerting himself.

Ready for more, he opened the door and invited in his next client.


End file.
